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2

there's loads of apple specific stuff on this site, people here just seem to enjoy being negative.
–
Chopper3May 12 '09 at 13:29

2

to be expected i suppose... we are sysadmins :-)
–
usernameMay 12 '09 at 13:32

works well for getting a MAC address. Using en1 will (almost always) get the Airport's MAC address, which is handy if only known devices are allowed onto your wireless network. Conversely, if you use en0 -- the built-in ethernet port -- you can then look the machine up in your Open Directory, like so:

This question overlaps quite a bit with this one about tools a UNIX administrator cannot live without. Many of the command-line tools for Mac OS X have UNIX roots, such as df, du, and which; however there are notable exceptions that have no obvious UNIX equivalents, such as osascript, open, pbcopy, pbpaste, and say.

is really handy. It is a command-line tool that you can optionally install the first time you run TextWrangler. [Other text editors (BBEdit, TextMate) likely provide something analogous.]

edit path/to/somefile

Opens up the file in TextWrangler, and will let you authenticate if you don't normally have permission to edit it. (You can even do it from an ssh session, and it'll open it for the logged-in graphical user).

Better still is that you can pipe things to it.

lsof -i | edit

for example, will show you your open network connections and open them up in TextWrangler, where you can search (and scroll) through them easily.

Force Demote an LDAP Replica to Standalone. If your Open Directory Master is misconfigured, sometimes trying to demote an Open Directory Replica using Server Admin will fail (eg: you might find your Replica server refuses to demote). You can use slapconfig to force it to demote on these occasions.